This Sunday 25 November 2012, I’m making my second novel, Zorn, available free for download on Amazon’s Kindle e-reader. The zero price lasts just for the day, but the download onto your Kindle is permanent. 

If you don’t have a Kindle, no problem. You can have the novel downloaded directly to your computer, providing you first download ‘Kindle for PC,’ which places a Kindle reading program onto your computer. 

I published this novel a couple of years ago, but never had time to promote it much, and I’d love some reviews, especially from the Xanga community. I’m also a little nervous as to how it will be received, as I did a few odd things with the English language, altering it to suit the needs of a future world.

ebook link    Kindle for PC application link 

The desires and agonies of real life stories often rival the inventions of fiction, and this author’s account of struggle and drug addiction proves that soundly.

The quarrels of parents, so fearful to small children, listening through the wall; the agonies of teenagers struggling to find their way and be accepted, the temptations of sex and drugs, the daily grind of earning a living in an indifferent world… this is all too familiar to many of us, and brought back to me more than one wince-making memory. Like the author, would that I could go back and re-do many things. 

The honesty and sincerity with which Carsten tells the true and gripping tale, of his struggle to find meaning and stability in life, shines through this gritty, no holds barred story. A harrowing yet inspiring journey through dreadful problems to hard-won solutions, well worth the reading time. 

(Amazon-posted review by Graham Worthington, author.)

Okay, so this blog is a little behind the times, as it was the seventeenth of this April 2012 when I went to see Irshad  at Indigo book store, in the Manu Life Centre, Toronto.

Irshad – Dr. Manji, to give her formal title – was there to speak on a modern and controversial theme that is actually timeless: the lack of intellectual honesty that afflicts many areas of Islamic teaching today, even as it does Christianity, and possibly every other religion that has become rigidified into official status. As is usual when authority that wants more authority seizes hold on the inner life, in their hands Islam becomes a club with which to whack the easy targets that most hijacked religions like to whack: those who like to question and think, women in general, gay people, Jews, and of course, those who don’t agree with the flavour of Islam favoured by the particular group in power. 

That’s my brief description of a crusade that has become the dominant purpose of Irshad’s life, which I hope has seized on the spirit of her writing, though cast into my own words. She has of course has laid out her thoughts with greater exactness in her two books, linked below to amazon…

 (my copy’s signed, in red!) and…  which I haven’t read yet, but will.

For those not familiar with the career of Irshad Manji, journalist, Muslim reformer, gay activist, asker of awkward questions, and disliker of such pleasantries as stoning to death for adultery, whipping for rape victims (yes, I said victims) etc., she has a website, www.irshadmanji.com

I too have a website - oh sorry I forgot; you’re on it – and an Amazon presence: Graham Worthington on Amazon

A plea for help from Seriously-Meredith

My cousin’s daughter has been missing since Saturday. Please share this with your friends and family so that she can be found safe and soon. There is a link on my post to the facebook page with all the important information. She is from Eastern Pa but could be in a nearby state by now.

http://seriously-meredith.xanga.com/763523153/missing-17-year-old–please-repost/

Distraction. The art of the magician lies in distraction.

Imagine you sit in the front row before a stage, determined to see through the trick. The magician strides onto the stage, cape swirling, wand poised to act. He strolls to left and right, surveying his audience, perhaps twirling the points of a satanic mustache, smiling mockingly at the crowd. Then, a swipe of the wand, a flash, a cloud of smoke, and a small table has appeared at stage center, bearing a white dove that coos and flaps its wings, and a white silk handkerchief.

You will not be deceived. The dove struts on the table, and you eye it intently. The handkerchief is of the same whiteness; how easy it would be to confuse the two. The magician calls for a helper from the audience; you spring to your feet and ascend the steps eagerly, eyes still fixed on the preening dove. Watch closely, says the magician, laying down his wand to take up the smooth bundle of feathers in one hand, the silken square in the other. Watch closely, and you will bound in astonishment.

His eye fixes yours, but your vision holds fast to the dove. His hands move swiftly, dove, kerchief, dove, kerchief, each rotating briskly around the other, till suddenly the dove disappears within the handkerchief’s folds. A gesture of triumph from the magician as he snaps aside the cloth… but the dove is still visible! It flaps, flies, rises into the dark above the stage, you tip back your head bewildered to follow it, then with a wild cry bound into the air, for the magician has jammed his wand right up your ass!

Distraction my friend, distraction. The art of the magician is distraction.

Link                   Link              Link

This Saturday, the unstoppable career of Ricky Tsang 

hit a new high, as he was featured on the front page of Weekend Life, the Saturday special supplement of Canada’s largest daily newspaper, the Toronto Star.

Recently interviewed by Toronto Star columnist Vinay Menon,

Ricky told of an epic 12-year journey, that started when he found himself tongue-tied in the presence of a pretty girl, to today, when as a newly fledged author he found himself placed in the spotlight by Vinay.  

As is usual with the new Ricky, he suffered no shortage of words to inform the Star’s readers on his feelings about life, fate, and most especially, women. There’s no way I can compete with Ricky in telling anyone what Ricky feels about anything, so why not go read his book yourself?

As I put together this blog, it occurred to me that although I’d naturally snatch up a copy of the Star before any other newspaper in Toronto, I knew very little of either it or its past, other than that its head office since 1972 is at the heart of Toronto’s downtown, at Number One on bustling Yonge Street.

Does a newspaper have a past, as though it were a living, growing human being? I was greatly intrigued to discover that apparently it does.

The Star’s impartial stance on news was established in 1899, when editorship of the then ailing newspaper was taken over by a most remarkable liberal and social activist, Joseph E. Atkinson. Althogh he was offered the post by a group of Liberal politicians, he took it only on condition he was bound to no political party. During the rise to power of the Nazi party, which culminated in the Second World War, the Star was the first opposing newspaper to be banned in Germany. Since Atkinson’s in  death in 1948, the Star has adhered to the journalistic principles that he laid down over a century before.

The good of this collection, its heart, lies in the rich subject matter, and the author’s feel for it; the vanishing world of a long established, determined and enterprising Asian community in Tanzania and other parts of East Africa. 

Those who have ever gazed at films on that exotic place, land of the red-clad Maasai, the roaming elephant, the towering giraffe, may also have wondered at the names of its great cities: Dar Es Salaam, Nairobi, Zanzibar. What was it like to live there in the turbulent era when British rule ended, and the swinging world of The West in the sixties beckoned? What opportunities beckoned, what miseries tormented, what dark secrets were hidden? How did the people live? 

Jules Damji, should well know, for he was a young, perceptive citizen there in those times, sliding now into history, and he has striven to capture them in these nine connected stories of how things were a generation and more ago.  

The openingstories tell of everyday life, as, beneath the shade of a mango tree, a young boy of the Ismaili Muslim community hears the curse of “Mama Khelele,” a spoilt and scolding “Novi Ladi” (new bride) and later the excitement of the world famous East African Safari grips him. But then he looks more deeply into life, learning the hidden story of The Caretaker, of the past forgotten heroisms that gave the elderly jamat bhai his medals, and of how hideous violence erupted in Zanzibar, and presently was past and forgotten, lost in the darkness of Africa’s tropic nights.

Warming to his work, Jules plunges into a fascinating account of scheming opportunists and corrupt officials in post-independence Tanzania. Indeed, this later chapter, which to me screams “true story,” is as unrestrained an account of lurking dishonesty ripening and sexual manipulation as you could wish to find in any steamy tale of lust and scandal. Africa’s dangers and horrors continue in the next story, as a naive youth becomes obsessed with the culture of communism and equality, dismaying his business like sister, and finally causing disaster.  

The last stories are more philosophic in tone, leaving the physical violence of the world outside the community to probe conflicts within, as an idealistic youth refuses to tread the path set by his worldly father, who desires to fulfill his frustrated dream of life in England through his only son. Here Damji illuminates a conflict that runs in the background throughout the collection, as indeed it ran through the Ismaili community: the sense of a modern, wider world versus pride, tradition and insularity. “My country,” mocked dad, “this is not our country. You really believe in your heart that these karias give a shit about us muhindis” Other winds of change blow as Jules introduces Jamil, who prefers visiting glamorous Oyster Bay to attending a religious festival; triggering his mother’s rage, for Jamil is her last hope of maintaining a scrap of good-standing within the community. Her final, tragic loss ends this bitter-sweet recollection of a vanished East Africa,  a collection well worth the read.

I like to measure as I write. It comes perhaps from being an engineer. But whereas pieces of steel can be measured to an inch’s thousandth, measuring the dimensions of writing is a much more floppy process. However, I feel that the process of writing a lengthy piece of fiction can be divided into three parts.

Writing the original text is an obvious must, but it is only one third of the process, even though it is the first laying out of the story and plot. Yet even that third is not pure, being rapidly altered in the form of changes of words, of word order within sentences, of sentence order within paragraphs, and paragraphs within the whole page, scenario, or whatever I’m trying to achieve within one session.

Rewriting the original text into the final, more finished version takes just as much time, but again the case isn’t pure, as rewriting in reality consists not so much of actual writing as of reading, as altering as little as one word in a sentence must be considered not only in its effects on the immediate sentence, but usually of the whole paragraph. Changing a sentence or paragraph may mean reading – yet again – an entire section of the chapter, or all the chapter. This latter form of rewriting is often accompanied by sighs of “oh balls, am I going to have to ditch the whole bloody chapter?”

Lastly, there’s a major task that I rarely find mentioned. In fiction writing, it’s necessary to do a stack of writing that is never intended to form part of the novel. I call this associated writing, and I lump it together with any needed research (which usually consists of studying anything from coral growth to VR games) and call it – grandiosely, but rather obviously – “Research and Associated Writing.”

I consider them together as one like this because Associated Writing (there, I’ve given it the grand title again) is in fact a form of research: I’m researching the story that I’m going to write by writing about it, often as though it already existed. I’m also researching the nature of the situation, society or world that I’m going to set my story in by creating it, step by step on paper, usually the electronic kind. While doing that, I’m free of the fearful challenge of actually producing the precise words that will one day be eternally fixed as part of the final story, hard black upon white paper, clutched in the eager hand of someone who yearns to learn of worlds unknown.

I find that with my mind relaxed in this fashion, standing back from the action of the final text, I can produce an area of prepared soil to plant actual, intended-for-publication text into. A major bonus of this is that often a part of this speculative rambling and defining turns, as if by its own will, into part of the actual novel. Associated Writing is a necessity, a useful way to chew on the task of writing that’s not a waste of time, as it makes possibilities and limitations obvious, and causes much of the novel to write itself.

  I wrote these two making heavy use of associated writing (link)

DearRicky Wows ‘Em in Ajax (link)

From three to five yesterday was a memorable slice in Ricky’s life, as he held centre stage at Chapters Book Store, in Ajax, Ontario, just east of Toronto. For two hours Ricky’s cup overflowed as the surging crowd of his many friends and supporters dominated the bookstore at this, Ricky’s first book signing.

I was there, talking to Ricky when he wasn’t beseiged, and otherwise wandering about, blathering to innocent strangers about Ricky, books, Xanga and all that stuff. I’ve never met Ricky before in person, just on Xanga - and very pleased I was to meet him and be part of this event. But even more pleased that this courageous young man was happy at the great turn out, where he sold at last count over seventy-three copies of his book, five years in the writing…

Ridiculous: The Mindful Nonsense of Ricky’s Brain

A literary orgy that is: a book signing, the kind of thing where crazed book fans meet up with legendary authors, a press-the-flesh event where screaming readers hurl themselves onto superhuman writers, who leer triumphantly, and do naughty things to their title pages with… instruments.

Ricky, being shy, describes it more modestly below:

Hey Guys, as some of you may know, I’ve recently written a new book called

Ridiculous: The Mindful Nonsense of Ricky’s Brain

Well, I’m excited to tell you I have a book “signing” coming up at the Chapters store in Ajax on September 17, from 3 to 5 pm.

Here’s the address: Chapters, Durham Centre, 90 Kingston Road, Ajax, Ontario. L1Z 1G1, Canada. 905 426 4431

Hope to see you there, Ricky.

I will be there. I was a mob holder-back once at a rock concert. You get to feel the chicks up on the sly.